In 2005, thirty-five-year old Sharon Shalom was appointed rabbi of a synagogue in the working-class town of Kiryat Gat. The synagogue was founded by Holocaust survivors; Shalom was born in Ethiopia, and moved to Israel at the age of nine. Charged with breathing new life into a declining community, he succeeded by filling the empty pews with . . . Moroccan Jews.

When not presiding over his congregation, Shalom is completing a dissertation on the religious outlook of Ethiopian Jewry, meant as the scaffolding for what will be the first-ever written code of Ethiopian Jewish religious law. Until most of the community moved to Israel in the 1980's and 90's, its traditions were largely oral and its religious life principally mimetic: children learned what to do from watching their parents. Now, in Israel, memories of former ways are fading, and the young are more interested in integrating into Israeli society than in preserving the life of their forefathers. Shalom has undertaken to compose the code of law at the urging of his professor, Daniel Sperber, for whom this may be the last chance to record and systematize Ethiopian traditions.

He has gladly accepted the challenge, but with a twist. In his view, Ethiopian Jewry has something important to say not just about itself but about the nature of Jewish tradition as a whole. Consider the case of tefillin, the phylacteries that men traditionally wear on their head and arm during morning prayers. This practice was unknown among Ethiopian Jews, a community that believes itself to have been cut off from the rest of the Jewish people before the Talmud was codified. How, then, should one respond to a pious Ethiopian elder who, keeping faith with his Jewish tradition, refuses to wear tefillin?

The attitude of the Israeli religious establishment has been to declare the Ethiopian tradition null and void. In his own analysis, though, Shalom notes historical and archeological evidence suggesting the presence of variant practices at the time of the Second Temple, when the laws regarding tefillin appear to have been first promulgated. The same goes for the late-classical and medieval periods. With this in mind, he argues that fidelity to an authentic Jewish tradition that happens to predate the one followed today should be considered religiously legitimate.

Shalom harbors no radical intentions. He's an Orthodox rabbi, after all, and has no desire to undermine the binding character of Jewish law. But he sees that character as having more to do with community than with theology. The bottom line for him is that the Jewish tradition has always exhibited a pluralist quality. At the same time, Israel's rescue and welcoming of the Ethiopian Jews has created an opportunity for his community to re-connect and become fully identified with the mainstream of today's Jewish people and its traditions.   

This approach has already won over Shalom's congregation—no easy task, given the mixed crowd. But for him the life of the synagogue, like his work with the Ethiopian code of law, is animated by two complementary values: pluralism, and the biblical promise of the ingathering of the exiles. Attend services at his K'doshei Israel synagogue, where survivors of the European Holocaust listen to the weekly portion chanted in the Moroccan cantillation, and one can be forgiven for thinking the Torah was really serious in promising (Genesis 28:3) that Israel was destined to become not a nation but a k'hal amim—an assembly of nations.